16 April 2008

Today’s keynote was John Patrick, talking about the future of the internet and implications for learning. There was a lot of the former, and unfortunately not enough of the latter. He made some great points, specifically that we’re only tapping 5% of the potential, citing a number of examples of where people were dropping the ball (what a great deal, getting paid to whinge about bad internet experiences :), and also about what was possible with coming developments. Here’s the mindmap:

In followup questions (part of the learning management colloquium), he talked a bit more about learning to learn (a pet fave of mine): that, generationally-independently, some get it and some don’t. I asked the obvious question: given that the internet has so much knowledge, but (as he claimed in his talk) that folks don’t necessarily have good internet skills, would the obvious implication be that the role of formal learning be about how to learn to learn with internet resources? His answer was discursive, unfortunately, but an interesting opportunity would be a software ‘net-surfing’ coach that watched your net strategy and provided guidance.

The opportunities of ubiquitous internet access are exciting, certainly, but I think it will take some smart ‘voting with eyeballs’ to really make a change. I’m an idealist, but I also recognize that individuals are satisficing, not optimizing, and people are still buying shoddy product (why are people still buying Coors?). How will we get the necessary cluetrain going? Odd thought: ridicule.